Alina’s Edu Discoveries #3 Cognitive traps in education

I gathered, for myself and for you, a set of mechanisms that explain a paradox we often see in our classes. Some students feel very confident about their knowledge and skills, but when the moment of truth comes, they get tangled up. Others, well-prepared and competent, doubt their abilities or believe their results are just a lucky break.

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth. Our brain often uses proxy signals to measure competence, and in education this can seriously mess with our heads.

The fluency heuristic drives the first illusion. Every so frequently we read a text smoothly, a lecture is easy to follow, the topic feels familiar, and the whole thing seems pretty simple. The brain likes that state because it treats fluency as a signal that says I’m good at this, I’ve got it. The problem is that fluency can be nothing more than an impression, regularly because we’re moving along tracks someone else laid out for us. As long as we’re on those tracks, we feel like we know. But when someone asks for details, requests justification, or wants us to apply the idea in a different context, it turns out we can’t retrieve anything meaningful from memory. This is the moment when we confuse ease of processing with in-depth understanding.

This connects to another effect, the illusion of explanatory depth, IOED. Many of us feel we understand a concept or a mechanism until we have to explain it in our words, describe how it works, or present it step by step. Then it often becomes clear that we only have a general outline in our heads, not a profound understanding. IOED is tricky because it feeds on illusion. If I recognize the term and can see how everything fits into a logical story, I assume I understood it. Unfortunately, recognizing and understanding are two different skills. All of this can create serious didactic trouble. If we learn mainly through passive contact with content, reading, listening, watching, we can live for a long time inside a comfortable fluency bubble, until the first situation where we actually have to use the knowledge in practice.

Moreover, there is a third mechanism, confirmation bias, which works like an amplifier for our beliefs. Our brain doesn’t like uncertainty, so it often closes the story quickly based on single signals. If it worked once, it adds I can do it. If it didn’t work once, it looks for an explanation that protects a sense of meaning. It might think the task was stupid, the question was a trick, or worse, I’m not cut out for this. After a while, the inner narrative starts steering what we notice and the decisions we make next.

Confirmation bias can also reinforce impostor syndrome in genuinely competent people, those with high standards and high sensitivity to evaluation. It is the tendency to question one’s abilities and attribute success to luck, despite real achievements and solid evidence.

As a result, one group believes they already know and don’t need to check. The other interprets their doubts as proof that they don’t know. And both stories are cognitively tempting, because they’re fast, coherent, and give a sense of control. The only problem is that they’re an illusion.

Let’s not forget the Dunning Kruger effect as well. At the early stage of learning, we often lack metacognitive tools and context to accurately judge our gaps. That’s why people with weaker performance more often overestimate their competence. Researchers explain that it doesn’t necessarily mean arrogance. It can simply be the absence of an internal cognitive map that shows what we still don’t know. We naturally build that map as we learn more about a topic.

And finally, we can run into the curse of knowledge. When we become experts in something, knowledge turns intuitive, steps blur together, and we stop noticing what’s obvious. As a result, we explain in shortcuts, skip foundations, jump stages, or use terms that feel natural to us but sound like a foreign language to a beginner. The greater the mastery, the greater the risk that we won’t see the very first step where a student is stumbling.

You’ll probably agree that sometimes in class we can encounter all of these mechanisms at once, and even fall into the trap of our illusions. So what do we do then.

A few didactic ideas for how to get out of it.

1. Fluency heuristic. After each chunk of material, pause reading or listening and ask students for a quick retrieval from memory. Helpful prompts include write down three key points, draw a simple diagram, or give two examples of your own.

   
   

2. Illusion of explanatory depth. Regularly ask students to explain a mechanism step by step in their words.

   
   

3. Confirmation bias. Before students start working on a task, give them quality criteria. The simplest form is a checklist, for example a good answer includes a definition, a boundary condition, an example, and a counterexample.

   
   

4. Dunning-Kruger effect. After completing a task, it helps to show a map of next levels or advanced topics. Without it, early-stage learners may not have a proper reference point. A well-designed self assessment questionnaire can also help.

   
   

5. Impostor syndrome. It helps to write down what the student did well and what they will improve in the next iteration, so successes become visible and named.

   
   

6. Curse of knowledge. A good practice is to break solutions into explicit micro steps and consciously spell out basic concepts that are already obvious to an expert. The so-called grandma test also helps, trying to explain the topic in simple language, but without harmful oversimplifications.

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The author of the article is Alina Guzik